12 ms·

> With approximately 16 hours of the day allocated to work and sleep, every individual has approximately 8 hours to allocate to “me time” and if used appropriat

> With approximately 16 hours of the day allocated to work and sleep, every individual has approximately 8 hours to allocate to “me time” and if used appropriately, a lot can be achieved in that nearly 3000 hours each year. Really if you are going to go to the extreme of not eating, showering, maintaining your health, zero human relationships, zero rest or time for recovering from illness, then I assume you'd go the next step and just quit the job too to unlock the other 2000 hours. After all if you don't need those other things why do you need a job at all? If you are that extreme you probably can save a years salary then live on a mate's sofa etc. Edit: Later on she does mention her time budgeting and it isn't this extreme, but I get annoyed with the statements that claim you have 8 free hours a day, implying that you should be working your ass off for those 8.

marsrover 8y ago
Pretty sure if you're that extreme you don't have any mates.
sanderjd 8y ago
This is also more like one or two hours for people with kids (which is a lot of people).
- Swizec 8y ago
  That’s 356 hours per year. You can do a lot in that many hours.
  - antisthenes 8y ago
    Depends almost entirely on how they are spread out. It takes at least 30-45 minutes to get into a task that requires deep thought and concentration. Even for tasks that don't require deep thought, there is prep work. Working out? Gotta commute to the gym or at least get changed. Gotta make sure you're not hungry but not full at the same time. Gotta make sure you're hydrated. Gotta make sure you have music ready to go. Woodworking project? Don't even get me started on that one. Whoops, you just lost 75% of your 'free time'. I don't mean to sound pessimistic, but a lot of projects require a lot of prep work and people vastly underestimate the amount of prep work required. At least anything that's complex and sufficiently rewarding to warrant working 365 hours on. Basically 365 free hours != 365 hours of working on your project.
    - coolaliasbro 8y ago
      Completely agree. And unless one is sufficiently privileged to have the space to leave setups as is, one needs to factor in cleanup/storage.
    - philipswood 8y ago
      There are ways to reduce on that 40-45 minutes and bring it down to 5-15 minutes. Some comments from a previous thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14528393 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14528393
      - antisthenes 8y ago
        Thanks so much for this! Bookmarked for some cool tricks!
  - jwdunne 8y ago
    After wake up routine, school run, a full day of work, the few hours the kids are up after work and the bed time routine? That 2 hours a night I'm half-dead exhausted.
    - all2 8y ago
      I don't know the breakdown of your schedule. But, would it be possible to immediately go to bed at the end of the day and then get up two hours early?
      - RussianCow 8y ago
        The point is, you have limited mental and physical energy. Shifting your schedule around just means you have less energy to devote to whatever you end your day with (which, in the case of kids, is not a good idea).
        coolaliasbro 8y ago
        I was attempting to say this above, more or less.
      - jwdunne 8y ago
        Tried this. My children are young. If I go downstairs, they will hear and think it's time to get up. How am I to demand they go back to bed when their role model isn't?
        ionised 8y ago
        Tell them if they want to get up that early like you then they need to crank out some production-level code.
    - coolaliasbro 8y ago
      I agree with the drift of this but would not describe myself as being exhausted for those 2 hours. More like just unwilling to anything not personally regenerative.
- rb808 8y ago
  I was going to agree because I thought you said 1-2 hours/week. There is no way most parents have 1-2 hours free time every day.
  - _AzMoo 8y ago
    I'm a parent and I've got about 1 hour of free time a day, between the time the kids go to bed and I go to bed. As much as I would like to I cannot bring myself to make in this time.
    - akuji1993 8y ago
      And that's okay, you are allowed to relax and not spend your whole day trying to improve and optimize and squeeze the productivity out of yourself. There's gonna be more relaxed days ahead, when the kids are bigger.
  - sanderjd 8y ago
    Probably depends on the age, but with a 7 month old I have approximately 5:30-6:30am and 8:30-9:30pm.
- coolaliasbro 8y ago
  And even more if on is committed to more meaningful interactions with their child(ren),and, like, walking the dog and whatnot.
blancheneige 8y ago
yeah, the whole 8 hours trifecta thing neglects a lot of round corners
munchbunny 8y ago
Another 2 get taken for eating/commuting if you live close to work, let's say you spend another 1-2 per day taking care of your school-aged children, so now you're down to 20-30 hours a week. Let's say you spend another 5 of those doing social things, that's 15-25 hours a week. Subtract another 5 to deal with errands... 10-20. Some more of that will likely go towards your spouse. That means you get something closer to 500-1000 hours a year. Perhaps you can get more if you carefully prune. That's enough to do stuff, not enough to accomplish a second career.
- tamersalama 8y ago
  it's not only that - everything else will be competing for those 10-20 hours (e.g.: gigs for extra money, learning, teaching, life-administrativia, personal growth, burnout, ...).
  - munchbunny 8y ago
    Just don't let it become an excuse. Put another way, your life might be complicated, but more improvement does require digging a bit deeper than the status quo, so it's still up to you to find or make time/energy to work on things. I'm in no place to tell you how much time or how to manage it, but you do get out of your time what you put in, and there isn't a shortcut for that.
- baroffoos 8y ago
  And after you finish all of that you absolutely want to spend those last few hours sitting down and resting. You will quickly burn out if you spend every minute busy.
  - imhoguy 8y ago
    Unless the work is a rest time. Not every job is demanding and if one turns of emotional reactions to workday situations then one will have more energy for later activities.
    - 8y ago
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
xtracto 8y ago
Yeah, that was my thought as well, I have a very tight schedule which allows me only around 9~10 hours a week to dedicate to my startup. Mo - Fri: . Wake up at 5:30 go to the gym (6 to 7.30) . 7.30 - 9.00 : Shower, breakfast, get ready to work 9. - 9.30 : Commute to work . 9.30 - 6.00pm : Work . 6.00 - 6.30pm : Commute to home . 6.30 - 9.00pm : Tue/Wed: Startup, MWF: Wife . 9.00 - 10.00pm: Dinner, prepare to sleep ... repeat Saturdays: 9.00 - 2.00pm . Startup So 5 hours on saturday + 5 hours on Weekdays = 10hrs in total. I wish I had more time.
- your-nanny 8y ago
  and frankly that's a killer schedule already...
- movedx 8y ago
  1.5 hours at the gym? Do you construct the equipment whilst there? 1.5 hours to take a shower, eat breakfast, and get ready for work? Are you flying to Columbia for the beans every morning? I plan each day the previous day. Planning the whole week hasn't worked for me as things change, meetings move, etc. Instead I plan on a day-to-day basis. 0500-0530: Wake, Put eggs on boil, shower whilst they boil, dress after shower, blend Soylent lunch (M-F), kiss wife goodbye for the day 0530-0545: Commute to office 0545-0830: Work on business, looking at Trello for the current or next task 0830-1200: Commute to client's site and do work 1200-1300: Dine, read/research and or chores 1300-1600: Work for client 1600-1615: Commute back to office 1615-1800: Work on business 1800-0900: Commute home, read, work on fiction, spend time with wife 0900-0500: Sleep. Rounding the figures, that's about four hours per day on the business whilst working full time for a client (I contract.) Saturday and Sunday are either spent at social events or on the business in the office (if the wife is busy working on her own projects.) So I manage about 25-30 hours per week. (Just to be clear here, I'm not saying you're doing something wrong, but just pointing out those time lines could be a bit tighter.)
  - int_19h 8y ago
    > 1.5 hours to take a shower, eat breakfast, and get ready for work? Are you flying to Columbia for the beans every morning? No, he's probably like a me and a good half of the population that doesn't naturally wake up early, so when we're forced to, we're very groggy, and it takes a while to get up to speed. If you're waking at 5am and don't find it taxing, you probably don't have anything to compare this to, hence your inability to empathize.
hnzix 8y ago
> implying that you should be working your ass off for those 8. TFA is saying you have a budget of 8 hours to allocate. The article explicitly states that relationships often consume a large chunk of that budget. It is descriptive, not prescriptive.
rglover 8y ago
If you consider that a permanent lifestyle, then sure, it's a bit extreme. But if you want to make something and don't have the budget to risk going full time, you have to sacrifice certain things. This idea that you get to do stuff that others don't (and expect any outcome of significance) while acting like "normal" people do is mind boggling. If you want more than you have, in any form, you better get comfortable sacrificing: time, relationships, etc.
- chosenbreed37 8y ago
  > If you want more than you have, in any form, you better get comfortable sacrificing: time, relationships, etc. True. Something has to give. But it doesn't have to be drastic.
- stephsmithio 8y ago
  I love this > This idea that you get to do stuff that others don't (and expect any outcome of significance) while acting like "normal" people do is mind boggling.
movedx 8y ago
I never got the same conclusion you did from the article. Steph stated that even just an hour a day over 365 days will drastically improve your business and or life. That means 3-4 hours per day focused on a few key priorities will provide exponential growth in the areas those priorities cover (and perhaps overs.) That's one of the primary take homes from this article, in my opinion. I think perhaps you read: burn those eight hours constantly, when Steph never stated that. She even goes as far to explain that "Netflix and Chill" is still a thing, but it's low on the list of time allocated activities.
codazoda 8y ago
I'm also a maker and I'm currently working on a zine series. I commute 1.5 hours a day and take a lunch break, bringing my total "at work" hours to 10.5. It's difficult to stay focused but most days it works out, at least for a few hours. I go in and out of creative periods. I learned to program by typing someone else's code. My zine series is designed to teach you as you create computer art. https://gum.co/splashofcode/hn https://gum.co/splashofcode/hn
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
Hydraulix989 8y ago
The year I graduated from college, this used to be my schedule (I lived right next to my workplace): 8:30 AM - wake up 9:00 AM - go to work at corporate job 9:30 AM - arrive at work at corporate job 5:00 PM - stop working, go home 5:30 PM - arrive at home, run 3-4 miles 6:00 PM - start working on startup 2:00 AM - fight fires, go to sleep Despite burning out a couple of times, I eventually got to the point where I could quit my job and work on my startup full-time. This didn't end up working out in the end, so it was a huge a waste of time (several YEARS). At the end of the day, figure out whether your startup and your cofounders are worth the opportunity cost. Engineers can make a lot of money in this market working at FAANG (with a similar financial outcome as an acquihire exit for top talent). This is controversial: Your startup should AT LEAST get accepted into YC -- that's the litmus test. If it can't even get past those relatively beatable odds, then it's certainly NOT worth it (YC acceptance de-risks things by a factor of 10 just purely based on statistics -- the partners are very smart, they are almost always right with their decision-making in terms of almost never having any false negatives -- but they still have 9/10 false positives, just statistically speaking). So if you DO get accepted into YC, draw the line at the one-year mark and make it firm. Return all the investors' money at that mark, and do something else (i.e. go work for Google). That's how you know you are not one of the 9/10 failures that still somehow make it into YC. It's a good initial filter in that if you get rejected, you know right away that what you are currently doing is definitely NOT worth your time (and if you disagree, you are likely susceptible to Dunning-Kruger or self-bias -- you really should have been able to convince the partners that you were worth funding over the large pile of crappy applicants, otherwise, the HIGHLY likely scenario is that you do not realize yet why you will fail). For startup funding, the distribution itself is Pareto -- even the second best accelerator has a 10x lower rate of success (and often their successes ended up getting accepted to YC after-the-fact anyways). The VERY BEST investors' opinions are a good barometer for measuring startup success (BUT only if YOU are the founder -- otherwise, the reward portion of the risk-reward curve is below the Pareto Front). If you can land a FAANG position, you'd have to start a unicorn on your own for it to be worth it (especially if you take in VC funding), so calibrate your success based on that. You can also adjust your risk-reward curve by joining late stage pre-IPO rocketships instead (Wealthfront has a list). Figure out where all the smart engineers are (they cluster) -- that's the winner you should pick. Even running a lifestyle business that generates similar income still probably isn't worth your time as a top engineer because of liquid stock appreciation from FAANG. Real talk: If you can't get accepted into FAANG, then you are in WAY over your head with starting your own unicorn (but doing a lifestyle business as a sole proprietor is probably financially optimal for you). The absolute worst thing to do with your time is join someone else's early-stage startup with a significantly reduced salary as employee #1 for sweat equity (despite it being a fraction of what the founders have) and build their entire tech stack yourself. This isn't even close to being on the Pareto Front. Don't sell yourself short. Also, you'll hear the story of that ONE exception who beat all of the odds. But you're a rational person, don't buy into that delusion. This logic can be nicely collapsed into a probabilistic decision tree.
TrickyRick 8y ago
Also she says she doesn't commute. Good on you mate, but most of the workforce doesn't have that luxury. I spend about 1 hour per day commuting which is on the low end for a lot of people. Then like you say comes all the other aspects, like spending 30m-1 hour getting ready for work in the morning.
- Cthulhu_ 8y ago
  Yup; an 8 hour work day is effectively 10 just with commuting included. In my case I've spent a long time commuting with the train, which would have given me like 20 minutes each way to work or do my own stuff - but for me that's too short, there's a big chance I would get too distracted and miss my stop, and I preferred just winding down for a bit during that time. Then there's mandatory things like getting ready in the morning and dinner etc in the evening. That time is constricted even further if you have a family. If you're lucky you have 4 hours, if you're really lucky you still have energy during that time to work on stuff.
chosenbreed37 8y ago
It is true that 8 hours me time is unrealistic for most grown ups with families. I still think that the thrust of her argument is valid. It would disingenuous to say that because we can't do what she's done we can't do anything at all.
Kiro 8y ago
I don't care about any of the things you mention so you're basically telling me to kill myself already since my life is meaningless? All I care about is working and building companies.
HenryBemis 8y ago
I had managed to make this transistion from permanent employement to contractor + enterpreuner 'on my own'. After I made the decision and the transition had started I felt the need to educate myself futher. So halfway I read many books on work/life/business/self-help and the two that (imho) helped more on this direction were: 1) What the Most Successful People Do Before Breakfast 2) The 4-Hour Workweek
- nnd 8y ago
  What were your key takeaways from 4-hour Workweek? Personally, I dropped reading it when it switched from generic motivational pep talk to praising virtual assistants.
IloveHN84 8y ago
You forget kids and family
lorenzorhoades 8y ago
I love these comments on Hacker News - Someone briefly skims the title and the first couple sections, and then makes some snarky comment about how unrealistic the article is. For some reason, these comments are almost always the most upvoted as well. You do have 8 hours of free time a day, and the whole point of the article is learning how to most effectively utilize those things. The article even has a name for all the things that get in the way like laundery, dinner, relationships, etc.
- quickthrower2 8y ago
  Guilty as charged. I’m embarrassed by how many upvotes it got. I was hoping it’d get buried as I have a better comment in this thread. But..... There is a lesson for writers to think about different kinds of readers, and read your post from different reader archetypes point of view.

marsrover 8y ago

Pretty sure if you're that extreme you don't have any mates.

sanderjd 8y ago

This is also more like one or two hours for people with kids (which is a lot of people).

Swizec 8y ago
That’s 356 hours per year. You can do a lot in that many hours.
- antisthenes 8y ago
  Depends almost entirely on how they are spread out. It takes at least 30-45 minutes to get into a task that requires deep thought and concentration. Even for tasks that don't require deep thought, there is prep work. Working out? Gotta commute to the gym or at least get changed. Gotta make sure you're not hungry but not full at the same time. Gotta make sure you're hydrated. Gotta make sure you have music ready to go. Woodworking project? Don't even get me started on that one. Whoops, you just lost 75% of your 'free time'. I don't mean to sound pessimistic, but a lot of projects require a lot of prep work and people vastly underestimate the amount of prep work required. At least anything that's complex and sufficiently rewarding to warrant working 365 hours on. Basically 365 free hours != 365 hours of working on your project.
  - coolaliasbro 8y ago
    Completely agree. And unless one is sufficiently privileged to have the space to leave setups as is, one needs to factor in cleanup/storage.
  - philipswood 8y ago
    There are ways to reduce on that 40-45 minutes and bring it down to 5-15 minutes. Some comments from a previous thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14528393 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14528393
    - antisthenes 8y ago
      Thanks so much for this! Bookmarked for some cool tricks!
- jwdunne 8y ago
  After wake up routine, school run, a full day of work, the few hours the kids are up after work and the bed time routine? That 2 hours a night I'm half-dead exhausted.
  - all2 8y ago
    I don't know the breakdown of your schedule. But, would it be possible to immediately go to bed at the end of the day and then get up two hours early?
    - RussianCow 8y ago
      The point is, you have limited mental and physical energy. Shifting your schedule around just means you have less energy to devote to whatever you end your day with (which, in the case of kids, is not a good idea).
      - coolaliasbro 8y ago
        I was attempting to say this above, more or less.
    - jwdunne 8y ago
      Tried this. My children are young. If I go downstairs, they will hear and think it's time to get up. How am I to demand they go back to bed when their role model isn't?
      - ionised 8y ago
        Tell them if they want to get up that early like you then they need to crank out some production-level code.
  - coolaliasbro 8y ago
    I agree with the drift of this but would not describe myself as being exhausted for those 2 hours. More like just unwilling to anything not personally regenerative.
rb808 8y ago
I was going to agree because I thought you said 1-2 hours/week. There is no way most parents have 1-2 hours free time every day.
- _AzMoo 8y ago
  I'm a parent and I've got about 1 hour of free time a day, between the time the kids go to bed and I go to bed. As much as I would like to I cannot bring myself to make in this time.
  - akuji1993 8y ago
    And that's okay, you are allowed to relax and not spend your whole day trying to improve and optimize and squeeze the productivity out of yourself. There's gonna be more relaxed days ahead, when the kids are bigger.
- sanderjd 8y ago
  Probably depends on the age, but with a 7 month old I have approximately 5:30-6:30am and 8:30-9:30pm.
coolaliasbro 8y ago
And even more if on is committed to more meaningful interactions with their child(ren),and, like, walking the dog and whatnot.

blancheneige 8y ago

yeah, the whole 8 hours trifecta thing neglects a lot of round corners

munchbunny 8y ago

Another 2 get taken for eating/commuting if you live close to work, let's say you spend another 1-2 per day taking care of your school-aged children, so now you're down to 20-30 hours a week. Let's say you spend another 5 of those doing social things, that's 15-25 hours a week. Subtract another 5 to deal with errands... 10-20. Some more of that will likely go towards your spouse. That means you get something closer to 500-1000 hours a year. Perhaps you can get more if you carefully prune. That's enough to do stuff, not enough to accomplish a second career.

tamersalama 8y ago
it's not only that - everything else will be competing for those 10-20 hours (e.g.: gigs for extra money, learning, teaching, life-administrativia, personal growth, burnout, ...).
- munchbunny 8y ago
  Just don't let it become an excuse. Put another way, your life might be complicated, but more improvement does require digging a bit deeper than the status quo, so it's still up to you to find or make time/energy to work on things. I'm in no place to tell you how much time or how to manage it, but you do get out of your time what you put in, and there isn't a shortcut for that.
baroffoos 8y ago
And after you finish all of that you absolutely want to spend those last few hours sitting down and resting. You will quickly burn out if you spend every minute busy.
- imhoguy 8y ago
  Unless the work is a rest time. Not every job is demanding and if one turns of emotional reactions to workday situations then one will have more energy for later activities.
  - 8y ago

deleted 8y ago

[deleted]

xtracto 8y ago

Yeah, that was my thought as well, I have a very tight schedule which allows me only around 9~10 hours a week to dedicate to my startup. Mo - Fri: . Wake up at 5:30 go to the gym (6 to 7.30) . 7.30 - 9.00 : Shower, breakfast, get ready to work 9. - 9.30 : Commute to work . 9.30 - 6.00pm : Work . 6.00 - 6.30pm : Commute to home . 6.30 - 9.00pm : Tue/Wed: Startup, MWF: Wife . 9.00 - 10.00pm: Dinner, prepare to sleep ... repeat Saturdays: 9.00 - 2.00pm . Startup So 5 hours on saturday + 5 hours on Weekdays = 10hrs in total. I wish I had more time.

your-nanny 8y ago
and frankly that's a killer schedule already...
movedx 8y ago
1.5 hours at the gym? Do you construct the equipment whilst there? 1.5 hours to take a shower, eat breakfast, and get ready for work? Are you flying to Columbia for the beans every morning? I plan each day the previous day. Planning the whole week hasn't worked for me as things change, meetings move, etc. Instead I plan on a day-to-day basis. 0500-0530: Wake, Put eggs on boil, shower whilst they boil, dress after shower, blend Soylent lunch (M-F), kiss wife goodbye for the day 0530-0545: Commute to office 0545-0830: Work on business, looking at Trello for the current or next task 0830-1200: Commute to client's site and do work 1200-1300: Dine, read/research and or chores 1300-1600: Work for client 1600-1615: Commute back to office 1615-1800: Work on business 1800-0900: Commute home, read, work on fiction, spend time with wife 0900-0500: Sleep. Rounding the figures, that's about four hours per day on the business whilst working full time for a client (I contract.) Saturday and Sunday are either spent at social events or on the business in the office (if the wife is busy working on her own projects.) So I manage about 25-30 hours per week. (Just to be clear here, I'm not saying you're doing something wrong, but just pointing out those time lines could be a bit tighter.)
- int_19h 8y ago
  > 1.5 hours to take a shower, eat breakfast, and get ready for work? Are you flying to Columbia for the beans every morning? No, he's probably like a me and a good half of the population that doesn't naturally wake up early, so when we're forced to, we're very groggy, and it takes a while to get up to speed. If you're waking at 5am and don't find it taxing, you probably don't have anything to compare this to, hence your inability to empathize.

hnzix 8y ago

> implying that you should be working your ass off for those 8. TFA is saying you have a budget of 8 hours to allocate. The article explicitly states that relationships often consume a large chunk of that budget. It is descriptive, not prescriptive.

rglover 8y ago

If you consider that a permanent lifestyle, then sure, it's a bit extreme. But if you want to make something and don't have the budget to risk going full time, you have to sacrifice certain things. This idea that you get to do stuff that others don't (and expect any outcome of significance) while acting like "normal" people do is mind boggling. If you want more than you have, in any form, you better get comfortable sacrificing: time, relationships, etc.

chosenbreed37 8y ago
> If you want more than you have, in any form, you better get comfortable sacrificing: time, relationships, etc. True. Something has to give. But it doesn't have to be drastic.
stephsmithio 8y ago
I love this > This idea that you get to do stuff that others don't (and expect any outcome of significance) while acting like "normal" people do is mind boggling.

movedx 8y ago

I never got the same conclusion you did from the article. Steph stated that even just an hour a day over 365 days will drastically improve your business and or life. That means 3-4 hours per day focused on a few key priorities will provide exponential growth in the areas those priorities cover (and perhaps overs.) That's one of the primary take homes from this article, in my opinion. I think perhaps you read: burn those eight hours constantly, when Steph never stated that. She even goes as far to explain that "Netflix and Chill" is still a thing, but it's low on the list of time allocated activities.

codazoda 8y ago

I'm also a maker and I'm currently working on a zine series. I commute 1.5 hours a day and take a lunch break, bringing my total "at work" hours to 10.5. It's difficult to stay focused but most days it works out, at least for a few hours. I go in and out of creative periods. I learned to program by typing someone else's code. My zine series is designed to teach you as you create computer art. https://gum.co/splashofcode/hn https://gum.co/splashofcode/hn

deleted 8y ago
[deleted]

Hydraulix989 8y ago

The year I graduated from college, this used to be my schedule (I lived right next to my workplace): 8:30 AM - wake up 9:00 AM - go to work at corporate job 9:30 AM - arrive at work at corporate job 5:00 PM - stop working, go home 5:30 PM - arrive at home, run 3-4 miles 6:00 PM - start working on startup 2:00 AM - fight fires, go to sleep Despite burning out a couple of times, I eventually got to the point where I could quit my job and work on my startup full-time. This didn't end up working out in the end, so it was a huge a waste of time (several YEARS). At the end of the day, figure out whether your startup and your cofounders are worth the opportunity cost. Engineers can make a lot of money in this market working at FAANG (with a similar financial outcome as an acquihire exit for top talent). This is controversial: Your startup should AT LEAST get accepted into YC -- that's the litmus test. If it can't even get past those relatively beatable odds, then it's certainly NOT worth it (YC acceptance de-risks things by a factor of 10 just purely based on statistics -- the partners are very smart, they are almost always right with their decision-making in terms of almost never having any false negatives -- but they still have 9/10 false positives, just statistically speaking). So if you DO get accepted into YC, draw the line at the one-year mark and make it firm. Return all the investors' money at that mark, and do something else (i.e. go work for Google). That's how you know you are not one of the 9/10 failures that still somehow make it into YC. It's a good initial filter in that if you get rejected, you know right away that what you are currently doing is definitely NOT worth your time (and if you disagree, you are likely susceptible to Dunning-Kruger or self-bias -- you really should have been able to convince the partners that you were worth funding over the large pile of crappy applicants, otherwise, the HIGHLY likely scenario is that you do not realize yet why you will fail). For startup funding, the distribution itself is Pareto -- even the second best accelerator has a 10x lower rate of success (and often their successes ended up getting accepted to YC after-the-fact anyways). The VERY BEST investors' opinions are a good barometer for measuring startup success (BUT only if YOU are the founder -- otherwise, the reward portion of the risk-reward curve is below the Pareto Front). If you can land a FAANG position, you'd have to start a unicorn on your own for it to be worth it (especially if you take in VC funding), so calibrate your success based on that. You can also adjust your risk-reward curve by joining late stage pre-IPO rocketships instead (Wealthfront has a list). Figure out where all the smart engineers are (they cluster) -- that's the winner you should pick. Even running a lifestyle business that generates similar income still probably isn't worth your time as a top engineer because of liquid stock appreciation from FAANG. Real talk: If you can't get accepted into FAANG, then you are in WAY over your head with starting your own unicorn (but doing a lifestyle business as a sole proprietor is probably financially optimal for you). The absolute worst thing to do with your time is join someone else's early-stage startup with a significantly reduced salary as employee #1 for sweat equity (despite it being a fraction of what the founders have) and build their entire tech stack yourself. This isn't even close to being on the Pareto Front. Don't sell yourself short. Also, you'll hear the story of that ONE exception who beat all of the odds. But you're a rational person, don't buy into that delusion. This logic can be nicely collapsed into a probabilistic decision tree.

TrickyRick 8y ago

Also she says she doesn't commute. Good on you mate, but most of the workforce doesn't have that luxury. I spend about 1 hour per day commuting which is on the low end for a lot of people. Then like you say comes all the other aspects, like spending 30m-1 hour getting ready for work in the morning.

Cthulhu_ 8y ago
Yup; an 8 hour work day is effectively 10 just with commuting included. In my case I've spent a long time commuting with the train, which would have given me like 20 minutes each way to work or do my own stuff - but for me that's too short, there's a big chance I would get too distracted and miss my stop, and I preferred just winding down for a bit during that time. Then there's mandatory things like getting ready in the morning and dinner etc in the evening. That time is constricted even further if you have a family. If you're lucky you have 4 hours, if you're really lucky you still have energy during that time to work on stuff.

chosenbreed37 8y ago

It is true that 8 hours me time is unrealistic for most grown ups with families. I still think that the thrust of her argument is valid. It would disingenuous to say that because we can't do what she's done we can't do anything at all.

Kiro 8y ago

I don't care about any of the things you mention so you're basically telling me to kill myself already since my life is meaningless? All I care about is working and building companies.

HenryBemis 8y ago

I had managed to make this transistion from permanent employement to contractor + enterpreuner 'on my own'. After I made the decision and the transition had started I felt the need to educate myself futher. So halfway I read many books on work/life/business/self-help and the two that (imho) helped more on this direction were: 1) What the Most Successful People Do Before Breakfast 2) The 4-Hour Workweek

nnd 8y ago
What were your key takeaways from 4-hour Workweek? Personally, I dropped reading it when it switched from generic motivational pep talk to praising virtual assistants.

IloveHN84 8y ago

You forget kids and family

lorenzorhoades 8y ago

I love these comments on Hacker News - Someone briefly skims the title and the first couple sections, and then makes some snarky comment about how unrealistic the article is. For some reason, these comments are almost always the most upvoted as well. You do have 8 hours of free time a day, and the whole point of the article is learning how to most effectively utilize those things. The article even has a name for all the things that get in the way like laundery, dinner, relationships, etc.

quickthrower2 8y ago
Guilty as charged. I’m embarrassed by how many upvotes it got. I was hoping it’d get buried as I have a better comment in this thread. But..... There is a lesson for writers to think about different kinds of readers, and read your post from different reader archetypes point of view.